Chapter 824 — Ever-Blurring Boundaries

Byron and Pea listened earnestly, committing Pi Yun's instructions to memory, and after a few seconds of silence Byron suddenly said, "...I'm about to set out for the north. The formal orders have come down; I leave in three days."

Winter was nearly over, and the development of the northern coast and the task of founding an imperial navy would begin in spring. Byron had known of this beforehand, and recently the orders signed personally by the head of state had finally been delivered into his hands.

This was no confidential mission—news of building the northern port and developing the northern frontier had already appeared in newspapers and radio programs days ago, and Pea had long known of it too. She pressed her lips together and raised her head to glance at Byron, but from the speaker came only a low, unhappy tremor.

"Pea is grown now, she can take care of herself," Pi Yun said, looking at this peculiar father and daughter. It was as though he had suddenly seen back several years—seen the days when Xuanyao City was still only a "Cecil Pioneer Camp," seen that middle-aged knight who had suddenly acquired an adopted daughter and was thrown into a fluster, seen that silent, obedient little girl so nervous and uneasy about her surroundings. The years flashed before his eyes, and this old druid, a man of no small life experience himself, shook his head with a smile. "We'll look after her too."

"Then I'll thank you in advance," Byron said, and then suddenly let out a breath and laughed somewhat self-mockingly. "What's come over me, getting all sentimental like this? I'm not usually this full of feelings when I leave on a trip..."

"Today is the day your daughter called you papa for the first time. Every father is like this," Pi Yun said, looking at Byron with the expression of a man who had been through it all. "Don't worry—one day she'll start finding you a nuisance. She'll complain you don't wash, complain your clothes are sloppy, complain you can't keep up with the young folks' pace, and spend all day listing your faults. By then you won't have so many feelings about it..."

Byron thought it over and gave Pea an awkward glance. "But I think she already finds me a nuisance right now."

Pi Yun: "..."

"And the way you described it all in such detail—is that because you're very experienced?"

Pi Yun: "...If there's nothing else, get out of here and stop disturbing an old man's experiments!"

Soon Byron left with Pea, and only Pi Yun and the technicians he led remained in the laboratory.

The assistants began tidying the equipment they had just used and compiling the detailed process of Pea's use of the Neural Thorn into reference material for later use, while Pi Yun shook his head and walked toward a certain cabinet with a crystal-glass partition at the side.

Inside the cabinet, several spare neural thorn devices sat quietly on their mounts, their cold metal surfaces glinting under the cabinet's interior light.

A soft sound of a sliding gate came from not far off, and Kamael, wreathed in a faint blue arcane glow, drifted into the room.

"I saw Byron and Pea in the corridor just now," Kamael said as he floated toward Pi Yun. "Pea was wearing a neural thorn—it looks like it's already working properly?"

"Smoothly enough," Pi Yun said with a laugh. "And you missed the very best part."

"As far as I'm concerned, the success of this project is already exciting enough in itself," Kamael buzzed, his gaze drifting to the cabinet beside Pi Yun, to those neural thorn devices. "Three finished units left... we should be able to move on to the next step."

"Combine the neural thorn with the Type II arcanotech terminal to create a magewright truly capable of casting spells..." Pi Yun's expression turned uncharacteristically serious, and he spoke as though thinking aloud. "By this point, the line between the extraordinary and the ordinary will have all but vanished..."

"Ordinary people will no longer merely press a button on a machine to release a specific spell. They'll be able to sense mana as true mages do, to direct extraordinary power with their own will and spirit. This will be a breakthrough in essence, and it is exactly what we have been striving to achieve..." There was no small emotion in Kamael's tone. "By then, 'extraordinary' will likely no longer deserve the name. It will truly become a power that every mortal is entitled to touch."

"The Ten Thousand Things End Society and the Sleepers spent seven hundred years completing the prerequisite technology for it—though that was not their original aim, we can certainly thank them for it now," Pi Yun said with a wink. "The brain-machine connection is the hardest part of letting ordinary people sense mana and control spells. The neural thorn has already solved that problem, so the work ahead will be much simpler."

"Let's begin," Kamael said. The blue light around his body gradually brightened, and his tone rose, growing especially cheerful and full of drive. "There is still so much for us to do."